Hot-blooded, cold-blooded and blue-blooded

11-11-2007

If you are part of a noble lineage, or so consider yourself, you can be hot-blooded, cold-blooded … or both things at the same time. For the rest of us who are often told that we travel on this earth on borrowed time, put on this earth to give added shine to the star of the blue-blooded, we are also allowed to be hot-blooded or cold-blooded, but only to a point; what is unquestionably forbidden is to rub elbows with the blue-blooded.

Mr. Chávez… can we ask you where you left your manners? The King of Spain can say “shut-up” to anyone that royally pleases him, but that doesn’t mean you can rub elbows with him, or for you to dare put him at the level of Bolivia’s “Indian” Morales. The throne has always been placed higher so that we can all see the monarch, even if “pygmies.” Well, let’s put aside our sarcasm and go on!

The truth is that it’s about time that we hang our cojones between our legs (males, that is!) instead of putting them in storage, replacing them for manners that are irrelevant, and which in this 21st century are archaic if not absurd. Royalty has reached the end of that rope we call obsolescence and, truth be said, the memories are not very pleasant. The Spanish people, in their variety of Iberian nations, already said what had to be said back in April 1931, when they gave King Alfonso XIII a hand in packing for good his royal luggage. It was Franco who returned Spain to the monarchy with his drafted succession law put into a referendum of dubious validity in 1947, giving it a tone of fidelity and putting Franco as regent, regency that would add another 28 years to his dictatorship.

And, as truth would have it, Don Juan Carlos I, even if one of the Bourbon dynasty, for those who firmly believe that the monarchy is a political aberration these days, the Spanish sovereign is just Franco’s heir. Although there are those who credit the king with helping maintain peace and democracy in Spain, be it true or not, it is something that is likely being way overplayed. Let’s give Spaniards proper credit for both their humanity and intelligence. Spain needs only to respect, and symbolically bow to, its constitution, and nothing or no one else.

But let’s get to the crux of the matter: what President Chávez said that dazzled the king so much, and by annexed-diplomacy, José Luis Zapatero, who governs in his name. Chávez is by temperament warm and passionate, a Latin hot-blood in politics and, I would suspect in other things; it is his nature… something which bothers a lot of people, and that includes every politician in the US for telling it like it is; but that’s his privilege, a privilege he has earned. That has been the case with Fidel Castro, and others in history, who have swam against the current to try to save their peoples from drowning.

Perhaps many will say that Chávez had no right to call the former Spanish president, José María Aznar, a fascist. The word fascist is super-loaded, and it’s true that all too often we overuse it in our lexicon; but let’s be somewhat indulgent; if people like Bush, Blair and Aznar gave us a Mussolini-dosage in the Azores, opening up the terror gates and giving true reasons for vengeance, are not fascist, can anyone else be baptized a fascist? If the King of Spain, as head of state, elected or not, is allowed to participate in political matters of those sister nations of Spain in America, those Latin-American heads of state can say whatever pleases them, if they are truly brethren. Aznar is just a poor wannabe that never quite made it, one who cannot claim the respect that he sent to hell as he embarrassingly licked George W. Bush’s boots.

By Royal Respect, the last word always belonged to the King of Clubs. And if you are playing poker and are going “all-in” with your pot, you’d better know what you are doing. At the end of the day, in this Ibero-American summit for 2007, the president and elected representative of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela had the winning hand. And if Don Juan Carlos still believes he has the winning hand, I truly think that he needs to make amends with the Venezuelan head of state, gaining a lot of followers as a result… putting aside, once and for all, that crown of his.